23. PROPERTY AND URBICIDE: Housing in Lebanon, +Nairobi floods, +Banksy, +scam centres, +Habermas and more

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Hello, and on our Urban Radar this month, we discuss devastating flooding in Nairobi, Miami and the role of Cuban diaspora in the city, in the context of a potential attack on Cuba, and Banksy's discovery and urban anonymity.
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We look at some of the hot topics shaping debate in the French municipal elections, scam centres in Cambodia, and what the death of Jürgen Havamas means for how we think about the public in the city.
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And with our guests, we discussed how property families in small towns in Lebanon have responded to violence and displacement over the past five years, and the relationship between property and land-related injustice in contexts shaped by military violence more generally.
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Welcome to Urban Radar, the podcast taking an urban lens on current affairs.
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I'm Tom Goodfellow, a professor in urban development at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.
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And I'm Beth Perry, Director of the Urban Institute and Professor of Urban Epistemics at the University of Sheffield.
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So, Beth, this is the first episode we've recorded since the start of this awful war in Iran and the and the wider region.
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We we did record and release the the last two episodes before those strikes on Iran began.
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Although some people may have listened since.
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And it's it's something that we will be getting into a little bit with our guests.
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And it's it's all over the news, it's dominating everything, obviously.
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It is, but we have decided not to cover it as an explicit story because there's almost too much to say.
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But as you say, it is a kind of backdrop and also motivation for the reason why we've invited these guest speakers on today.
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And of course, this current war started on the 28th of February, but Lebanon has been experiencing constant violence, wars, and displacements for decades, in which the people of Lebanon have always been the victims.
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So this really sits behind some of the research that we're going to talk about today.
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And our first guest's research looks at questions of land and housing value in some of these contexts shaped by intense, persistent military violence.
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We're going to be joined by Hannah Sender, who's a Leverhume early career fellow at the University of Sheffield and associated at the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut.
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Hannah's background is in urban planning and her research examines land and housing relations in Lebanon.
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And Hannah joined Sheffield to be mentored by you a couple of years ago, didn't she?
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And of course you're still mentoring her.
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And I have the privilege of joining the team slash poaching Hannah since you went off to Manchester.
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So it's really great that we can have her on the podcast today, and feels very timely to be talking about these issues with her.
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Yeah, and we have obviously wanted to have her on for quite a long time.
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I mean the the previous rounds of assaults on Lebanon as well were something we discussed, but um she didn't feel ready at the time.
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It's great that she is coming on now.
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And also she's coming with a colleague.
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They'll both be joining us online.
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Uh her colleague Mariam Bassi is a researcher at the Beirut Urban Lab with a background uh in landscape, architecture, and urban design.
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Mariam's currently working on questions of cultural heritage, destruction and reconstruction with a focus on Palestine and Lebanon.
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And she's leading a project as part of Hannah's Fellowship, which examines how property-owning families are responding to military violence in Lebanon.
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So we'll hear more about how that project sits within Hannah's wider project and of course how she's managing to do research in this context in Beirut and Lebanon more.
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Before that, of course, we're going to discuss what's on our radar.
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So let's crack on.
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So, Tom, what's on your radar?
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So there were obviously many stories, as ever we could have chosen, and as mentioned before, we wanted to not focus too much on the war in Iran, um, partly because we'll get into it later, uh, but also because it really does, it has buried so many other stories, and there are still so many other things happening.
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So, even though I'm not going to talk about Iran or the Middle East in my radar, um, unfortunately that doesn't mean that it's uh full of positive stories.
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Um there are a mixed bag, let's say, but I was particularly struck by a story about flooding in Nairobi because it's very much um obviously an urban story.
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It it was devastating floods that many people won't have necessarily registered just within the last few weeks.
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And this was also on my mind partly because I'd recently been in Nairobi uh working there in relation to the African Cities Research Course Consortium, among other things.
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And um this was basically in early March, 6th to the 7th of March, there was very heavy rainfall, flash flooding overnight mostly.
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Uh the rivers, um many of them over overflowed, uh, waterways burst their banks, and you saw more than 100 millimetres of rain within 24 hours, which was above average, and essentially around 70 people are thought to have died in flood-related deaths, uh, mostly in Nairobi.
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A few things I just wanted to say about the causes of this.
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So obviously there's been a quite a bit of soul searching about why this happened and the flood defences being inadequate, uh, things around that.
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I mean, we were looking at rivers while I was there.
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A lot of a lot of families and households had been displaced from riversides because of flood risk, which was contentious in some ways, but I think people saw the value of and probably will be appreciated at this point.
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Now, there's a certain amount of, you know, waste dumping, inappropriate drainage, informal development by developers and households that has been um highlighted as as a cause for these floods because the drainage infrastructure simply isn't working.
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But the other really significant thing here is, and I noted that I think it was the governor, um, perhaps the governor of Nairobi, a senior politician anyway in the area, made this point about the infrastructure deficit and how we're really seeing the effects of this big infrastructure deficit in the fact that the city couldn't cope with these floods.
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And while, of course, to some extent that's true, a lot of this was about inadequate drainage and unregulated development.
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It's also become evident that uh major infrastructure projects themselves have been part of the problem.
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So again, it comes back to this framing always of Africa and even sometimes within the continent as this kind of deficit and gap situation with regard to infrastructure.
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But actually, some of the major projects, including some studied by some of our colleagues, Zheng Li Huang, we've talked about major roads in Kenya through her work, those in themselves are not adequately incorporating drainage and other things.
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It's such a mundane issue to talk about drains, but it's I've come across it so frequently in urban Africa.
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Drains and roads are intimately connected.
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People want the roads, they're excited by the roads, but the drainage aspects are not adequately taken account of.
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And actually, these things can become these funnels for water.
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They can become rivers.
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So a lot of the major infrastructure channels became effectively rivers that then spilled over into neighbouring informal settlements.
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So it's not just about deficits, it's also about big infrastructure done badly or not taking into account climate risks.
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I mean you're right.
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I hadn't seen this covered in the news because there's so much else going on.
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But when I had a very brief look at it, when you said you were going to talk about it, one of the things that came up for me was on the Greenpeace website.
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But they were talking about how these big infrastructure projects you were just mentioning have also led to huge amounts of deforestation.
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And it reminded me of some of what Junior was talking about in that episode, where we need to see forests as infrastructure and as equally valuable, because it's not just about sort of like the drains that we might build or might not build to take water away, but how absorptive is the capacity of the landscape.
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And so this idea that Kenya's forests are, I think they describe it in this article as the urban green lungs, and they are being polluted effectively.
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There's also something that it made me think about, because obviously a lot of the impacts are in informal settlements, aren't they?
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And I was thinking about Monica Martin Grow's work, who's a PhD student here at the University of Sheffield and is looking at these kinds of water tinkering practices in informal settlements in Nairobi.
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And you've got this really odd juxtaposition where in many places there's not enough water a lot of the time.
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And then you have this deluge when places get flooded.
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The thing that also makes me a bit sad is that I know a lot of those riverside areas are being re-imagined and planned by communities, and there has been you know the the the city government has given them kind of authority to think about these areas as public spaces, as recreational spaces, and all of those spaces are you know highly at risk and could themselves be destroyed even if there's no longer housing on them.
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So yeah, it's a it's a very it's a sad story.
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It was it was the governor of Nairobi actually who made that point about the infrastructure deficit.
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And he's right because I mean this this is uh this is about how you think about infrastructure in the round.
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Okay, so it's not it's not simply about we need more big infrastructure, it's that we need flood management to be taken seriously throughout.
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Absolutely.
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Okay, so my second story was inspired by something I saw in the New York Times about um fears within the Miami uh community, Cuban, Miami Cubans, essentially, large number of diaspora, Cuban diaspora obviously in Miami, about what might be happening in Cuba, as some people might know.
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Trump, not content with his various wars, is also thinking about trying to engineer a sort of regime change in Cuba.
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This has been bubbling away for a while, but it's kind of coming to a head.
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And what's really interesting about this story to me is the role of the Cuban diaspora in Miami, in the city's politics, and actually how we might think about the role of particular diaspora communities in urban politics more generally.
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So I'm not going to talk that much about the Cuba aspect, and I don't know what's going to happen there.
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Although I think one thing that's quite interesting is Trump is clearly somewhat downsizing his ambitions for regime change in other countries, if you like, because he's really, it seems like, or certainly how the New York Times has reported it, that the ambition in Cuba is not to launch a major war or even really a regime change and get rid of the whole Castro-associated regime.
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But rather he specifically wants to remove just the president.
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So I guess this is partly based on uh what happened in Venezuela.
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Um but the president, Miguel Diaz Canel, is somebody that Trump wants uh out of power, but he's not necessarily proposing to actually change the whole regime.
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And that's what a lot of the people in Miami are upset about because they want to see, you know, you have a very Republican Miami-based um diaspora who, over, you know, since 1959 has been growing in Miami and of course is opposed to the communist regime in Cuba.
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So what's interesting about this story is that in some ways they're they're worried he won't go far enough, as he's now kind of just wanting to remove the president rather than do anything more significant.
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But um yeah, I mean that it reminded me of how we think about diaspora in relation to urban politics more generally.
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So there's lots of cities that, you know, where you have a very significant, sometimes the one of the most significant voices in urban politics is a diaspora group.
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And I think Miami is one of the more extreme examples.
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And we can think about how this plays out in other cities around the world.
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It might it it made me think about the role very different, much less powerful in national politics.
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But in my own work, when we think about the role of the Somali community in Sheffield, who were instrumental in encouraging the government of Sheffield, the city government, to recognize Somaliland as an autonomous, independent country some time ago.
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And that now puts Sheffield in a slightly strange position because of the fact that Israel has recognized Somaliland as an independent country.
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So there's a lot of politics now within the Somali community about finding yourself on the same side as Israel in recognizing Somaliland.
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And so Sheffield's um I don't know how Sheffield is managing that or if it's become an issue for the city, but it's interesting that that came through a kind of progressive engagement with a diaspora community some decades ago.
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We can also see in parts of the US, the Taiwanese and Vietnamese, particularly diaspora, are very significant.
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So in California in Orange County, you've got an area known as Little Saigon, where the Vietnamese are extremely powerful in local politics.
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And there have been, for example, around flags, there's been a lot of politics around what flags you can or can't fly, how you name public spaces, where that diaspora has been really, really significant.
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And then, of course, if we think about the um Somalis again in Minneapolis, now, even though a lot of those high-profile killings by ICE were not people of Somali heritage, the fact that politics around ICE and immigration is so alive in Minneapolis has very much been about the involvement of the Somali community over successive decades, even though that's sometimes invisibilized in those big stories about what's been happening with ICE.
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So, anyway, but to come back to Miami, I just found it very interesting that you now have a largely Republican right-wing diaspora that in some sense wants Trump to go further in his foreign adventures than he actually wants to go himself by trying to actually overhaul the whole Castro regime rather than just remove the president.
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And it remains to be seen how that will play out.
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Or by those that are very unhappy about what's happening at the moment.
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And then I actually also was struck by the Cuban story in relation to the fact that it's a blackout, a power outage that Trump's also talking about taking advantage of.
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So again, yesterday there was a headline which was Trump predicts US will have the honour of taking Cuba amid power blackout.
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So these kinds of infrastructure failures, in this case electricity, which obviously is going to have huge impacts on cities all over Cuba, is being used then as an excuse, a pretext for this uh honourable, friendly takeover.
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Okay, so my third radar item is about the graffiti artist Banksy.
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It follows an earlier discussion that we had on an earlier episode about graffiti, but this is specifically in relation to the purported discovery of Banksy's identity, the unmasking of Banksy by a large, uh long report in Reuters, which claims to have identified him as a Bristol-born man called Robin Gunningham, which had been alleged before by the mail on Sunday some some time ago.
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But they now say in this Reuters report that he's going by the name of David Jones.
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And they discovered this through basically tracing his moves in various ways, his friendships with Robert Del Narja, who's a musician from Massive Attack, who at some point people thought was Banksy, but now they think he's sort of Banksy's friend and enabler.
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And also looking at the work he was doing in um Ukraine and trying to trace his travel in that way.
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So the thing I want to raise here is less a discussion around graffiti again, or around um necessarily the Ukraine aspect of his work, although that is very interesting in the context of how we think about urban art and urban political statements.
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But it's more about this unveiling of him as this anonymous artist.
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Because my first thought when I read this was, why have they done this?
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You know, you know, people like the fact that Banksy's anonymous, it enables him to do his work, it's part of his mystique, obviously, he benefits from it.
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But I was a bit sort of unsettled by this.
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And if you read the Reuters article, they spend a couple of paragraphs early on justifying this and saying, well, you know, we anonymous anonymity has all kinds of benefits for Banksy.
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Um and we recognize that it's part of his kind of brand, but also our work is to explore and unveil people, and you know, we're not going to kind of separate him out from that.
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We're going to kind of do our I wasn't very convinced about it in some ways as a kind of just as a reader, a casual reader.
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But anyway, they provided a justification and they, in various ways, traced him and found out who he was.
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In some ways, it's quite an old school piece of investigative journalism looking at who's passed through airports, who was moving with who at what time.
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But the thing I really wanted to raise about this was it kind of, in my head, it sort of chimed in a slightly jarring way, perhaps, with other things I've been listening to and reading recently about surveillance technology and about how radically, and this is sorry, this is a bit of a negative story, uh, things are going to change in terms of the capacities for states.
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And it's already happening, right?
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And you have companies like Palantir, which we're always hearing about with this extremely sophisticated surveillance technology that has been used very much as part of the ICE work in the US, tracking immigrants and so on.
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And I just thought, actually, one, maybe this kind of journalism, investigative journalism to uncover people's identity, it it feels like almost like this is the last of its kind, or there won't be much more of this anymore because the systems will be so sophisticated that this idea that somebody could be a mystery would would barely exist.
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Um but also, you know, justifying this kind of level of unveiling of somebody who is really just an artist, and even though he might be, in some cases, breaking the law in certain ways, that's kind of tolerated.
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And so what kind of where are we going actually if um we're gonna be in a position to do extremely high-level surveillance, and we have justifications for that on all kinds of levels.
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And the other thing that I just wanted to mention, which I want to pick up more at some point in the future, because we've talked about this, about getting legal expertise on the podcast, is what this means for the law.
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So there was a very interesting discussion on Ezra Klein's podcast, um, I think it was last week, where he was talking to someone whose name I forget, he's a kind of prominent, sort of right-wing libertarian commentator in the US, I would say, about how fundamentally the very nature of the state and what it does is going to transform when you enter a world where the law can be fully enforced.
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Because we exist in a world where partial enforcement, you know, is is actually normal.
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We do not expect or believe that laws will be fully enforced.
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But when you get to a situation where you can track and trace everything, that changes.
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So the Banksy story just made me think, gosh, I've I feel a shift in the future where this kind of journalism, A, won't be necessary, and where the justification is taken as a given.
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No, it's really interesting.
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I didn't know where you were going to go with this story, but you know, raising that question about our right to privacy and anonymity in the streets under conditions of surveillance capital is really important.
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The other thing I was just thinking about was you are firstly your obviously your propensity for low-tech solutions, because you kind of like, you know, the the Louvre Heist, which is like done with a ladder and the Banksy who's getting away with doing things under the nose to tell us such retro stories, you know.
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We're not going to see them.
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But also just to give you a bit of hope, the one thing I did do when I knew you were covering this story was just look at who else is going under uh an anonymous guise.
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And there is actually a female Banksy called Bambi, um, who has been operating for some time um and has actually uh you know done things like is they get commissioned by all the famous like people like Robbie Williams to like do commissions of their babies and things like that.
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So there are some people still trying to go under the radar.
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I think there will be.
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And I even came across an Iranian Banksy and a Russian Banksy, like lots of people who are trying to do the same kind of thing.
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I think actually, and interestingly, just to maybe cap this off, like I having said that, this is retro, we're not going to see it.
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Like the Louvre heist, you know, it happens in the context where we already have very high levels of technology.
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They're not being fully deployed.
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They will be deployed more, but there will be people who will try very hard.
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Everyone's talking in the context of the Iran War about this idea of asymmetric warfare, which I remember learning about during my masters, you know, because it's and it's very evident.
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Like you can be the underdog, have far less sophisticated technology, but you can find ways to to mess things up in asymmetric ways.
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I think we'll be asymmetric warfare.
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Asymmetric art, asymmetric uh, what were we talking about the other one?
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Subtervising in the urban commons, Thomas DeCaver's work.
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So people will have to get super creative and super basic in one way.
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What's on your radar?
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Well, I'm going to go to France and look at the French municipal election.
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And as with all of these local elections, as we were talking about actually with the by-election in Gorton-Denton last radar, there's very high stakes because these always foreshadow national outcomes.
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Most of the press um coverage has been on the sort of cleavage between the far right and the far left, the fact that there's been a decreased voter turnout, um, the lowest apparently since COVID.
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So, I mean, inevitably there's always these the classic kind of issues that get debated in local elections.
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But the story that actually caught my eye was one that was in Reuters, which was that possibly for the first time, or at least most prominently, the location of data centres is appearing as a flashpoint in these local municipal elections.
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So there was an article that was talking about a place outside Paris called Le Bourget, where the candidate is standing on a platform specifically to reverse date plans for a data centre.
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So they're citing things like heat islands, noise, the fact that there's not going to be very many jobs that are created, the kind of strains on the power grid, dominance of big US tech, all of these kinds of things.
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And the candidate, who's described as a former judo champion, I'm not quite sure why that's relevant, but I kind of enjoyed that fact, said that the race to build AI data centres was no answer to the industrial decline of working class towns.
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So this is quite common, apparently, according to the Reuters article.
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There's like other towns, at least 10 towns, that have this kind of campaigning against new data centres as a key part of the election platform.
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Um, and you'll know anyway that, you know, obviously we've had announcements this week from Rachel Reeves in the UK that the UK is going to be like leading Europe for AI investment.
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Um, President Um Macron is saying the same kind of thing.
00:20:41.200 --> 00:20:47.519
And it will be interesting to see whether we have the same kinds of challenges emerging when we have our local elections on the 7th of May.
00:20:47.680 --> 00:20:55.599
You know, there's already been like one victory for campaigners who have mounted a legal challenge over a data centre in Buckinghamshire on environmental grounds.
00:20:55.759 --> 00:21:01.119
So I thought that was quite an interesting one, just because these aren't usually election topics at the local level at least.
00:21:01.519 --> 00:21:07.200
It's very interesting politically as well to think of what kinds of candidates are going to campaign against data centre investments.
00:21:07.279 --> 00:21:14.480
So we know that you know environmental infrastructure, like obviously wind turbines and things, have been a big feature of sort of right-wing campaigning against those.
00:21:14.559 --> 00:21:20.400
But with data centres, it's a bit more complex because obviously people concerned about the environment are worried about their environmental impact.
00:21:20.640 --> 00:21:25.200
But there's also a new argument coming in around security and vulnerability of data centres.
00:21:25.359 --> 00:21:30.960
So the you know, there's been talk in the context of the Iran war of attacks on data centres, because they're just sitting there very exposed.
00:21:31.200 --> 00:21:31.440
Absolutely.
00:21:31.680 --> 00:21:39.279
And they're a fundamental way that you can attack the now quite strategic site of data centres given the way that they're kind of imbrocated with security and defence.
00:21:39.440 --> 00:21:42.960
So there may also be arguments about that that relate more to national security issues.
00:21:43.039 --> 00:21:44.240
So it's definitely uh hot.
00:21:44.880 --> 00:21:45.359
Yes, absolutely.
00:21:45.519 --> 00:21:52.880
I mean, on a lighter note, I did decide to just go and see whether or not um, like in the UK, you ever get any comedy candidates in French local elections?
00:21:53.119 --> 00:22:01.119
Because you might remember that um once in Hartlepool in the north of England, we had a mayoral candidate who stood and won on a Free banana platform.
00:22:01.279 --> 00:22:02.559
Do you remember that in 2002?
00:22:03.039 --> 00:22:05.920
Of all the things to get for free, bananas wouldn't really swing me, I don't think.
00:22:06.240 --> 00:22:11.519
Well, they got elected on a free banana platform, but then actually really focused on education and youth.
00:22:11.680 --> 00:22:13.839
Um, but in France, I found one example.
00:22:14.000 --> 00:22:21.680
In the 2001 elections in Marseille, a sausage dog called Saucisse won 4.5% of the vote.
00:22:21.839 --> 00:22:29.119
This is a stray dog who turned crime fiction mascot and actually then went to uh be entered into the presidential election by his owner.
00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:30.720
Amazing.
00:22:30.960 --> 00:22:31.200
Yes.
00:22:32.160 --> 00:22:33.359
Okay, so what else have you got?
00:22:33.599 --> 00:22:34.880
Sausage dogs and bananas.
00:22:35.519 --> 00:22:36.720
I mean, sorry, French elections.
00:22:36.880 --> 00:22:37.200
What else?
00:22:37.680 --> 00:22:38.240
The one, yes.
00:22:38.400 --> 00:22:39.759
Um well, it's a bit more serious.
00:22:39.839 --> 00:22:43.519
So well, actually, it was the imagery of this story that really caught my attention.
00:22:43.680 --> 00:22:52.000
It was an abandoned scam compound in Cambodia, um, from where a whole range of scams have operated to obviously target people from around the world.
00:22:52.079 --> 00:22:56.640
And this was a camp compound that had been bombed by the Thai military during border clashes.
00:22:56.720 --> 00:23:09.119
And the images show buildings full of bullet holes, collapsed ceilings, you know, uneaten food and drink, fragments of scripts on the floor that are used in scams from romance to fake banks or to police.
00:23:09.279 --> 00:23:14.799
And of course, these scam centres, in a way, they're not new, although they are being covered a lot in the press at the moment.
00:23:15.039 --> 00:23:26.319
Um, and partly that's because they've grown out of sort of these big casino developments in Southeast Asia and special economic zones in the late uh 2000s and had had a really massive rapid growth.
00:23:26.480 --> 00:23:28.799
Some people are saying that that coincides with COVID.
00:23:28.960 --> 00:23:35.920
And it's estimated that in Cambodia, online fraud schemes bring in something like£12.5 billion annually.
00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:40.960
That's half the country's GDP, um, more trade than in synthetic drugs.
00:23:41.279 --> 00:23:43.599
So um, yeah, this has been in the news a lot.
00:23:43.680 --> 00:23:46.480
Um, and I was just thinking about well, what are the urban dimensions here?
00:23:46.559 --> 00:23:51.039
Um, I mean, the first issue really is about well, where do workers come from and where do they go to?
00:23:51.200 --> 00:23:55.200
So workers are often victims of trafficking, often coming from big cities.
00:23:55.279 --> 00:23:58.559
And once these scam centres do get closed down, it's equally concerning.
00:23:58.720 --> 00:24:05.359
Because there was a report from Amnesty International that the survivors of these cyber scam farms often end up destitute on city streets.
00:24:05.519 --> 00:24:08.799
Um, a lot of aid workers have been saying there's really not enough being done.
00:24:08.880 --> 00:24:10.640
This is a new humanitarian crisis.
00:24:10.720 --> 00:24:18.319
And of course, we know you covered it right back in story one, I think, last year, that um there was a massive cuts in humanitarian aid.
00:24:18.480 --> 00:24:25.440
And so some survivors are actually then feeling that they have to go back into the scam compounds to get off the streets.
00:24:26.000 --> 00:24:34.160
Um, so there's also quite a lot of stigma associated with people who have been have been trafficked because they haven't got the papers or the right permissions, so they're often criminalised themselves.
00:24:34.400 --> 00:24:43.920
I think the other thing I wanted to say was just that the these scam compounds have grown in these border towns and form new kinds of urbanization.
00:24:44.000 --> 00:24:46.960
They're sprawling complexes of scam infrastructure.
00:24:47.119 --> 00:25:00.640
The compounds are really vast, there's a lot of internal infrastructure, um, and so they've been equated to things like special economic zones or gated communities, and they're very contested territories, often near borders, so there's a lot of jurisdictional ambiguity.
00:25:00.799 --> 00:25:13.039
Um, I read one piece of analysis saying that these are like coercive labour corridors linking global cities to um these spaces, peripheral spaces of exploitation, which obviously put me in mind of some of my colleague John Silver's work.
00:25:13.200 --> 00:25:17.119
Um, and actually there doesn't seem to be a lot of analysis in urban studies about this at the moment.
00:25:17.200 --> 00:25:25.920
Um, but I did find one paper in Critical Asian Studies about the idea of compound capitalism by Ivan Francisini, Ling Lee, and Mark Bow.
00:25:26.160 --> 00:25:39.839
And they were saying these scam centres are really manifestations of predatory capital, and they identify like exceptionality, labour segregation, forceful data extraction, and reliance on desperate workers to sort of come up with this idea of compound capitalism.
00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:48.960
And I think we've seen this quite a lot in several of the stories that we're we've covered around how global and local flows, the digital and the physical, come together in all kinds of different ways.
00:25:49.119 --> 00:25:51.599
But at the end of the day, people are ending up on the streets.
00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:56.319
Yeah, I mean it's a very serious issue and a massive issue in that region within Southeast Asia.
00:25:56.480 --> 00:26:04.559
And I think you will be seeing more uh academic literature on this soon because this uh, when you mentioned this, it brought to mind my colleague Jonathan Goodhand, who I work with at the FCDO.
00:26:04.640 --> 00:26:06.960
Uh, he's also a senior research fellow there.
00:26:07.039 --> 00:26:15.039
And um he'd recently come back from a scam centre in Myanmar where he's he's doing some research along with Xu Peng, Patrick Mihan, and Naomi Yonder.
00:26:15.279 --> 00:26:20.880
They've got a project looking at these scam centres, and they they flourish in border zones and they flourish in conflict-affected zones.
00:26:20.960 --> 00:26:26.400
And and as you said, a lot of people are lured there with the promise of a well-paid tech job in Thailand in this case.
00:26:26.559 --> 00:26:33.200
Um, but then they're often forced to work these, you know, 16-hour days, underarmed guards to meet these brutal kind of profit quotes.
00:26:33.359 --> 00:26:38.480
And apparently, just in Myanmar, there's something like 50,000 to 100,000 people working in these scam senses.
00:26:38.559 --> 00:26:40.240
It is absolutely immense.
00:26:40.559 --> 00:26:46.400
And also, I mean, just to finish on this, and in a way, this, you know, this is a very strange segue back into your point about sausages.
00:26:46.640 --> 00:26:47.839
No, sausage dogs, wasn't it?
00:26:48.000 --> 00:26:50.799
I mean, it's a it's a serious issue, but there's a process called pig butchering.
00:26:51.200 --> 00:26:52.400
Yes, I've come across this, yeah.
00:26:52.720 --> 00:27:01.440
Which refers to the luring of people into a fictitious promise of either romance or investment opportunity, which is likened to sort of fattening an animal before you then slaughter it.
00:27:01.519 --> 00:27:02.319
I mean, it's really horrible.
00:27:02.640 --> 00:27:03.039
It's horrible.
00:27:03.119 --> 00:27:06.240
I was reading quite a bit of detail about the different scams, but I didn't think we'd have time.
00:27:06.480 --> 00:27:07.920
Yeah, horrid on so many levels.
00:27:08.079 --> 00:27:10.160
But um yeah, the massive and growing issue.
00:27:10.640 --> 00:27:12.720
Have you ever been victim of a scam?
00:27:14.000 --> 00:27:24.640
I have been tangentially a victim of a scam that was to do with the hotel in Paris and being double charged by a mysterious fictional hotel manager, but I don't think it involved it could have been.
00:27:25.039 --> 00:27:25.519
I have as well.
00:27:25.599 --> 00:27:35.119
I had someone phone me, tell me I'd already been the victim of a scam, and therefore I needed to make good by providing certain kinds of security details, and I did unfortunately fall for it.
00:27:35.359 --> 00:27:44.400
So I'm gonna move on to my last story, which um is the death of Jürgen Habermast, um a German academic philosopher and public intellectual um in the post-war period.
00:27:44.480 --> 00:28:01.440
And he might not be especially well known outside academia here in the UK, but much more of a household name in Germany, um, because he's been a very prominent commentator on issues like student revolts in West Germany in the 1960s, the speed of which of reunification or championing uh a united Europe.
00:28:01.599 --> 00:28:10.240
And his work's been really influenced by um his upbringing in Nazi Germany and just been seen as a very important person in critical theory generally.
00:28:10.319 --> 00:28:18.160
And I saw the announcement of his death and thought, well, it could be quite interesting to think about how his ideas have helped us understand cities and understand the idea of the public.
00:28:18.400 --> 00:28:23.759
Of course, someone beat me to it, uh, so I then came across a Substack newsletter, which is the new rage, isn't it?
00:28:23.839 --> 00:28:25.920
Everybody's got their Substack newsletters nowadays.
00:28:26.079 --> 00:28:26.240
Yeah.
00:28:26.480 --> 00:28:27.839
Um but a podcast.
00:28:28.079 --> 00:28:29.119
Or a podcast, yeah.
00:28:29.440 --> 00:28:30.319
Never both.
00:28:30.640 --> 00:28:31.279
That's too much.
00:28:31.519 --> 00:28:32.880
It really would be too much, wouldn't it?
00:28:33.039 --> 00:28:47.519
No, so this was a Substack newsletter by Tommaso Vitali, who's a professor of sociology at Science Po and Dean of the Urban School, and he's done a really good job in kind of covering why we should care uh about Habermas as urban theorists, as urban studies scholars.
00:28:47.680 --> 00:28:52.720
And partly this is about how we understand participation, how we understand public space, and how we understand planning.
00:28:52.960 --> 00:29:00.480
And um Vitali was saying, well, this is really about his book, Habermas's book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, is a book about urban space.
00:29:00.559 --> 00:29:07.759
It's about how civil society and public space provide an opportunity for reasoned dialogue and debate and collective action.
00:29:07.920 --> 00:29:15.359
Um, Habermas gives us ideas about how we think with people and how people develop relations of reciprocity on the ground.
00:29:15.440 --> 00:29:24.559
Um, and he talks about how these life worlds that are developed by people amongst themselves can get invaded by the system, the system of money and administrative power.
00:29:24.799 --> 00:29:28.720
So there's a lot that we can say about the relevance of Habermas.
00:29:29.119 --> 00:29:34.400
Um actually made me think about some of the work that our colleagues here at Sheffield have done recently.
00:29:34.559 --> 00:29:41.359
Um, listeners, our biggest fans, will remember that early on we had Malcolm Tate and Hugh Ellis on the podcast.
00:29:41.599 --> 00:29:50.960
And very recently, Hugh and Malcolm have published their The Sheffield Declaration of a New Vision for Planning, which we'll put in the show notes.
00:29:51.039 --> 00:30:05.599
And this has been launched by the Town and Country Planning Association here, and they talk about these four principles for planning, like working for sustainable development, doing no harm, serving the public interest with integrity and openness and supporting democratic decision making and public trust.
00:30:05.839 --> 00:30:07.440
So, what's that got to do with Habamass?
00:30:07.599 --> 00:30:12.960
It's because actually Habermas's ideas have been really influential in planning, in talking about the communicative turn.
00:30:13.039 --> 00:30:21.200
So, like people like Patsy Healy or John Forrester is about rethinking how do we do planning, how do we come up with good ideas about the places that we want to live in.
00:30:21.359 --> 00:30:30.319
And I just want to end, though, by picking up some of the problems with some of these ideas and particularly how they might apply outside um Western or European contexts.
00:30:30.400 --> 00:30:34.799
And it lies not so much in planning as a process, but how we conceptualise the public.
00:30:35.039 --> 00:30:47.279
So there's scholars like Nancy Fraser who have argued that Habamas was quite naive because he assumes this single public that's very consensus-oriented, that assumes that everybody's equal, that everybody can have a voice in public.
00:30:47.599 --> 00:30:51.680
Um and so she talks about these subaltern counter-publics instead.
00:30:51.839 --> 00:31:08.480
Um then we see that scholars such as Mona Fawaz, whose work obviously in the Beirut Urban Lab we're going to talk about a bit later with Hannah and Mariam, they've gone further because Mona argued that, of course, in contexts such as Lebanon, where the state barely exists, the whole idea of the public itself is fractured.
00:31:08.559 --> 00:31:11.519
And there isn't this kind of sanitized ideal of rational communication.
00:31:11.680 --> 00:31:14.400
Many people don't even want to live together, let alone plan together.
00:31:14.720 --> 00:31:18.559
Um and so I think we really need to take seriously that there are multiple publics.
00:31:18.640 --> 00:31:30.720
Um, and even though people say Habermas is an overlooked urbanist, it's often also criticized because his ideas have been Eurocentric, rationalist, um, and sometimes assume too much homogeneity as the basis of collective outfit.
00:31:32.319 --> 00:31:39.279
I mean, it's interesting hearing about this because I I I studied Habermass years ago as an undergraduate, and I remember reading Nancy Fraser's critique and so on.
00:31:39.359 --> 00:31:44.160
And then actually, since being an urbanist, since being working explicitly on urban issues, I haven't thought very much about Habermass.
00:31:44.319 --> 00:31:49.759
But the other the other the other thing that obviously comes to mind which you haven't really mentioned explicitly is around social media and the digital public.
00:31:49.839 --> 00:31:54.799
And I'm sure there are reams of literature about this, and so I'm no authority on it at all.
00:31:54.880 --> 00:32:13.200
But it has come up recently in conversation around protests, including Gen Z protest, and the role of youth and the question of class and this kind of quite vexed question of whether it really is the middle classes who are driving the upheavals we're seeing, and what is the public sphere for them in the relation to the digital versus the physical.
00:32:13.359 --> 00:32:20.960
I mean, these are very live debates where Habamas's work, I think it still holds relevance, even though it's it has all those problems embedded within it.
00:32:21.039 --> 00:32:28.960
But perhaps a revisiting of his work at this point would be particularly interesting given what we're seeing in terms of the relationship between the public and urban politics around the world.
00:32:29.200 --> 00:32:34.240
And as you say, some of the last things that he's worked on have been around the digital realm and how that's influencing that.
00:32:34.480 --> 00:32:47.759
Just by way of seguing into our conversation next with Hannah and Mariam, I mean, I think we also need to note that Habermas was quite controversial in terms of the statement that he made after October the 7th, 2023.
00:32:47.920 --> 00:32:58.799
Um, because obviously, growing up in the war in the Nazi regime and then in the post-war era, Habamas had this kind of really strong sense that Germany needed to reconcile itself with its history.
00:32:58.880 --> 00:33:18.319
Um but there was a lot of upset and backlash when he made a statement with other prominent academics condemning not only the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, but also criticising the use of the term genocide, which obviously has since been confirmed by a UN Commission of Inquiry, and also saying that Israel's military retaliation to Hamas was justified in principle.
00:33:18.400 --> 00:33:27.279
And so this has caused quite a lot of backlash by other sociologists, and one of those prominent sociologists is Asef Bayat at the University of Illinois.
00:33:27.440 --> 00:33:37.119
Um and the main critique is that Habamas didn't apply his own ideas, namely that all subjects can interact equally and that there shouldn't be a worldview of a dominant actor imposed on another.
00:33:37.279 --> 00:33:46.960
And I think it's really important um just because it really questions what it means to be a public intellectual at these times of war and violence, displacement and genocide.
00:33:47.039 --> 00:33:59.599
Um I don't know if we've got time, but there's an amazing quote that Bayat actually wrote in 2023 sort of to respond to Habamas' statement, which was These are unsettling times, Professor Habermas.
00:33:59.759 --> 00:34:04.960
It is precisely at such times that the wisdom, knowledge, and above all the moral courage of thinkers like you are most needed.
00:34:05.200 --> 00:34:13.360
Your seminal ideas about truth and communicative action, cosmopolitanism, equal citizenship, deliberative democracy and human dignity remain immensely important.
00:34:13.599 --> 00:34:21.599
However, your Eurocentrism, German exceptionalism, and the closure of free debate about Israel and Palestine to which you contribute would appear to contradict these ideas.
00:34:21.840 --> 00:34:24.320
I fear that mere knowledge and awareness may not be enough.
00:34:24.480 --> 00:34:30.960
After all, how can an intellectual know without understanding and understand without feeling, as Antonio Grampshi wondered?
00:34:31.119 --> 00:34:35.519
Only when we feel the suffering of one another through empathy might there be hope for our troubled world.
00:34:35.679 --> 00:34:43.599
So whatever you might think about Habamas's statement, the letter and the response, I think those words feel really important to hold on to at this time of deepening crisis.
00:34:43.920 --> 00:34:59.920
Yes, they they do, and I think this is a really apt moment to move into that conversation with our colleagues who work with the Beirut Urban Lab, where, as you said, there is this sense of a radical uh fragmentation of anything like a public sphere that requires, you know, a lab based in a university to kind of fill some of that gap.
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:04.719
And that's the context in which Hannah and Mariam have been working over the last few years.
00:35:17.519 --> 00:35:25.039
Okay, so you are the first guests we've had on the podcast since the start of this horrifying war in Iran and in the wider Middle East.
00:35:25.280 --> 00:35:34.480
And the relevance of your research, particularly in relation to Lebanon, will become clear as we get into some of the detail, and particularly as as things are unfolding in Lebanon right now.
00:35:34.559 --> 00:35:37.840
Um so thank you so much, both of you, for taking the time to join us.
00:35:38.000 --> 00:35:38.480
Welcome.
00:35:40.239 --> 00:35:41.199
Thank you for having us.
00:35:41.679 --> 00:35:42.159
Thank you.
00:35:42.320 --> 00:35:42.639
Hello.
00:35:43.360 --> 00:35:54.159
So, Mariam, you're joining us from Bear Root online, and we just want to start by thanking you deeply for taking the time in amongst this horrific devastation and loss of life that we know you're encountering.
00:35:54.239 --> 00:35:56.480
And we really can't begin to imagine the challenges.
00:35:56.559 --> 00:35:59.440
We were chatting a bit about it before we started recording.
00:35:59.599 --> 00:36:03.599
Um please do stop if at any time you want to in the conversation.
00:36:03.679 --> 00:36:06.239
But um, we're just very grateful for you joining us today.
00:36:06.960 --> 00:36:07.679
Absolutely.
00:36:07.840 --> 00:36:25.519
And um I think we want to begin, if it's all right, by going back a bit to the to the start of this project and think thinking about the research you've been doing together and how it how it came together before moving on to thinking about some of the implications of the current war and situation, including for doing urban research generally in in Lebanon.
00:36:25.760 --> 00:36:33.519
Um But yeah, let's hear a little bit initially about the projects that you, Hannah, set out to do before you actually even met Mariam, I believe.
00:36:33.599 --> 00:36:39.440
Uh, where this was also before the events of October the 7th, 2023, when you first designed the project.
00:36:39.519 --> 00:36:41.760
So it's it's it's had all of that disruption as well.
00:36:42.159 --> 00:36:48.480
But maybe you can tell us a bit about what you were initially hoping to do with this Levi Hume Research Fellowship um project.
00:36:48.960 --> 00:37:02.480
At that time, I was looking at the rapid urbanization of small towns in the Beccar Valley to the east of the country, um, which had rapidly urbanized, you know, predominantly as a result of mass forced migration from Syria.
00:37:02.960 --> 00:37:19.679
Um and, you know, a lot of people had um rented out their apartments, even built new apartments, um, rented out kind of plots of land and fields and so on to people from Syria.
00:37:19.920 --> 00:37:25.920
Uh, and this was really the primary source of shelter for a lot of Syrians who have been displaced.
00:37:26.400 --> 00:37:40.159
Um, and you know, my PhD didn't really get to touch on it, but I became really interested in the property owners themselves and how they had essentially become the primary protagonist of urban change in these small towns.
00:37:40.719 --> 00:37:48.719
Um, and I was taking a lot as well from Mona Fawaz, who I know you've had on the podcast maybe a couple of episodes ago.
00:37:48.800 --> 00:37:52.639
So I really recommend folks going and listening to her to her as well.
00:37:53.119 --> 00:38:04.480
Um but anyway, I was kind of interested in what these property owners were doing and how they were making their decisions about what they would do with their properties in response to this massive increase in housing demand.
00:38:05.360 --> 00:38:09.920
Um and I was also really interested in you know the family dynamics.
00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:18.000
I understood that property was kind of a family affair, people made decisions about what to do with their houses, what to do with their land as family.
00:38:18.400 --> 00:38:24.079
But also I was interested in how kind of kin-like relations were extending beyond the family through property.
00:38:24.800 --> 00:38:29.039
So this was kind of what I was thinking I would look at.
00:38:29.280 --> 00:38:36.480
Um and then, of course, you know, um there was the escalation of hostilities.
00:38:36.639 --> 00:38:44.079
This is the phrase that folks use to describe what happened in September 2024 between Hezbollah and Israel.
00:38:44.239 --> 00:38:59.760
And this really meant the instigation of a huge bombing campaign by Israel in Lebanon, um, massive destruction of the south of Lebanon, um, places in the Beccar Valley, and of course the southern suburbs of Beirut as well.
00:39:00.400 --> 00:39:11.760
Um there was a ceasefire in uh November 2024, but Israel has violated that ceasefire almost every day since it was um agreed.
00:39:12.079 --> 00:39:16.320
And of course, the violence has only dramatically worsened in the past couple of weeks.
00:39:16.880 --> 00:39:20.239
So let's talk a bit about what that's meant for your research.
00:39:20.320 --> 00:39:37.599
Um, because of course, you know, you set out thinking that there was a relative situation in which you were able to go to Beirut, to go to Lebanon, to carry out the work, um, and to focus on this particularly sort of novel dimension of questions around displacement in times of violence, but through the idea of property owners.
00:39:37.920 --> 00:39:45.920
And it's interesting because when I read about your project, I sort of it evokes the kind of the everyday family life of the middle classes.
00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:56.239
Um, and quite often when we think about displacement, we're we're the media conjures up these images of sort of refugees and very particular kinds of tropes of what that looks like.
00:39:56.320 --> 00:39:58.559
And you're looking at a very particular demographic.
00:39:58.719 --> 00:40:07.760
And also when we think about property, we often talk about big real estate developers and how they're influencing our cities, but you're looking at a very different, very particular kind of niche.
00:40:07.920 --> 00:40:10.480
So these were really important questions already.
00:40:10.880 --> 00:40:23.760
So, with the waves of violence that you've just been talking about and how that's affected Lebanon at various changes, I mean, how have you been able to adapt the questions that you're seeking to answer and your approach to answering them?
00:40:24.960 --> 00:40:31.280
It's been a bit of a challenge to be honest, and it's been a bit of a moral challenge as well.
00:40:31.360 --> 00:40:37.599
You know, sometimes we look at our work as researchers and we wonder what the point is.
00:40:38.079 --> 00:40:51.440
And certainly, you know, faced with these realities in Lebanon, you know, I was kind of paralyzed, I guess, for a little while about whether what would be the right thing to do.
00:40:51.920 --> 00:40:57.599
Um, you know, what is the relevance of doing urban research at this time when people are just trying to survive?
00:40:58.159 --> 00:41:05.519
You know, partly it's an issue of of work and you know, purpose, and that being something that we all share.
00:41:05.599 --> 00:41:11.440
And I guess you know, wanting to continue that not just for me, but also for you know my colleagues.
00:41:12.400 --> 00:41:28.239
Um and yeah, then I guess as well, like thinking about it, you realize that actually while things are very very difficult uh in Lebanon, there are some fundamental things that haven't changed.
00:41:28.480 --> 00:41:32.400
You know, housing policy hasn't massively changed in that time.
00:41:32.880 --> 00:41:46.480
Property owners are still the primary providers of housing for the displaced, you know, whether it's for their own family members or for strangers um, you know, renting out uh places for people to stay, uh and so on.
00:41:46.639 --> 00:41:49.280
So, you know, they're still very important, I guess.
00:41:49.519 --> 00:41:57.519
And some of those kind of fundamental ideas that I had were still relevant, I think, and still are relevant today.
00:41:57.760 --> 00:42:15.440
So I just I guess I had to rethink obviously my methods and to rethink, you know, what was possible to learn given that I couldn't go to Lebanon and do this research, and nor can Mariam travel very easily around Lebanon um and you know do any research in person.
00:42:15.760 --> 00:42:17.119
So we had to think differently.
00:42:17.679 --> 00:42:21.679
Definitely want to hear more about these new methodological approaches and the new questions you're asking.
00:42:22.000 --> 00:42:35.440
Before we do, though, I think it would just be good to hear from you, Mariam, a little bit more about your your work up to this point um with the Beirut Urban Lab, particularly because, you know, as you said, Hannah, you you had questions like, what is the value of doing urban research in this time of crisis?
00:42:35.599 --> 00:42:43.840
But as we heard from Mona, and I think as you will probably tell us more, actually urban work, urban research and analysis can can play really important roles.
00:42:43.920 --> 00:43:03.280
Um, the Beirut Urban Lab uh has been well known for its work in tracking the herbicide in Gaza after October 2023, documenting the change the built environment through the war, also within Lebanon as well, its effect on cities, on open spaces, on people's ability to live in the city, essentially, creating data for that purpose.
00:43:03.440 --> 00:43:09.199
So can you tell us a little bit more about that kind of work, Mariam, which I believe you've been involved in before this project?
00:43:09.920 --> 00:43:10.800
Yeah, yeah, sure.
00:43:11.039 --> 00:43:26.639
Concerning the platform, uh tracking the herbicide in Gaza, actually, when this work was started directly after the onset of the of the war on Gazza, and we thought that we wanted to do something uh regarding what is what is happening there, and we want to contribute in a way.
00:43:26.880 --> 00:43:32.719
Uh the first thing that actually started was uh not the tracking but the base map itself.
00:43:33.039 --> 00:43:40.400
Because uh there was no up-to-date uh map for Razza that is comprehensive, that is available and open source.
00:43:40.639 --> 00:43:48.320
Uh so we we started by by mapping what was there before 2020, August uh October 2023.
00:43:48.639 --> 00:43:59.599
Uh so that meant actually uh verifying uh hundreds of thousands of buildings actually manually uh from multiple sources and uh like satellite images, open street maps.
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:06.159
And other data sets just to establish what existed there before the uh the herbicide.
00:44:06.559 --> 00:44:15.119
From there, we mapped all the different institutions, infrastructures, and importantly, as well, the green and open spaces, the heritage layer.
00:44:15.519 --> 00:44:25.440
Um then we started added the tracking of the damage uh over time uh by overlaying data sets from like UNISAT onto this space map.
00:44:25.599 --> 00:44:38.000
So we could see how the destruction has uh has affected the built environment at the at the individual and the building and landscape scale, uh not just like aggregates or heat maps.
00:44:38.079 --> 00:44:43.599
It's just it's it was very uh specific to the building, uh, to the building scale.
00:44:43.840 --> 00:45:10.079
Um we also tried to understand from a people-centered perspective how the displacement that disrupted the uh daily life, the acts of everyday resistance, uh we started mapping those uh using photos, videos, uh testimonies that were shared online, uh, which showed really the connection of people to Gaza and their built and lived environment.
00:45:10.480 --> 00:45:25.760
Um yeah, so this this kind of research actually uh was very important to us at that point, uh, first for contributing for what was for the for what was happening, and uh uh it also opened up um different opportunities for us.
00:45:25.920 --> 00:45:30.639
It's uh we we started looking at it through continuing a research that we have started with Dr.
00:45:30.800 --> 00:45:39.360
Waidal Harithi uh on how does archiving, if we consider this as an act of archiving, how does it inform recovery later on?
00:45:39.760 --> 00:45:54.880
Uh and um it also allowed us to to to narrate the herbicide, given this temporal dimension that we that we had, like tracing how this violence was actually systematically deconfiguring the territory over time.
00:45:55.360 --> 00:46:18.480
Um it helps us look at different tactics that that were used by the Israelis, uh like the large-scale clearance of for military control, the fragmentation through corridors and buffer zones, the targeting of infrastructure, uh the livelihoods of people, and the the like the forced displacement uh uh into these shrinking enclaves that were there.
00:46:18.719 --> 00:46:35.840
So these patterns of destruction, uh through through mapping them, it helped us to to look at it uh and uh uh as something that is not incidental, but something that is systematic and that is core to the to an Israeli settler colonial uh strategy.
00:46:36.320 --> 00:46:52.559
So you've been able to um learn a lot through that work before collaborating with Hannah and through the work of the Beirut Urban Lab about how to do work in these contexts of limited access to reliable information and then what it means to document and to map systematically.
00:46:52.719 --> 00:47:00.000
And no doubt you've in the process overcome a lot of challenges about collecting data and navigating those in the research.
00:47:00.239 --> 00:47:21.119
But just turning now to the work that you're doing with Hannah and the focus on property and property relationships, like how have you been able to use those methods to understand how house owners have responded during the 2024 to 2025 attacks by Israel and subsequent uh ceasefire?
00:47:21.280 --> 00:47:27.360
I mean, have people been able to use property and displacement as sources of income that has helped them to survive?
00:47:27.599 --> 00:47:42.320
I think if we if you want to talk about the properties and our research in the South, it's important to understand how the two years, two, three years of war shaped actually the geographic and the political landscape in the South.
00:47:42.559 --> 00:47:47.039
Um, so what was called ceasefire in 2024 didn't actually mean a ceasefire.
00:47:47.119 --> 00:47:52.400
It was a continuation of the war on the ground, but with a different intensity and more prolonged.
00:47:52.880 --> 00:47:59.679
So attacks did continue in different forms, like targeting houses, uh, people, vehicles, even agricultural land.
00:47:59.920 --> 00:48:04.079
So uh there was ongoing violations, as Hannah has already mentioned.
00:48:04.239 --> 00:48:10.239
And uh so and geographically, this actually produced an uneven landscape in the south.
00:48:10.400 --> 00:48:27.199
So we've had border villages that were almost completely destroyed, uh like effectively turned into a completely no man's land, a buffer zone, uh, where there was uh no return of people yet, uh even until the the last uh the last escalation.
00:48:27.440 --> 00:48:36.159
Uh while other areas in uh in between the borders and the Litani River, they were uh damaged, they were damaged, but they were still functioning.
00:48:36.400 --> 00:48:44.000
And there were also um uh added uh um cities like like Nabatia and Sur in the southern cities.
00:48:44.159 --> 00:48:51.920
They they became host cities for they they they housed actually more than tens of thousands of people who were uh displaced at that time.
00:48:52.320 --> 00:49:01.920
So um so the this uh and one more important thing about uh these 15 months is that reconstruction was not allowed.
00:49:02.079 --> 00:49:08.239
It was something that is uh very different than what happened in uh different wars, like in 2006.
00:49:08.320 --> 00:49:13.440
Uh post 2006, reconstruction started right after the immediately the the next day.
00:49:13.599 --> 00:49:26.480
But in um um during uh after the ceasefire, uh reconstruction was uh was tied, was delayed, was it was politicized, and it was uh like contingent on political demands, which didn't happen.
00:49:26.639 --> 00:49:30.880
So that's why the the atmosphere in general was that of uncertainty.
00:49:31.039 --> 00:49:38.400
And people were actually anticipating this this war that has just uh uh occurred again in March 2026.
00:49:38.800 --> 00:49:50.159
So um uh so in in amid this uncertainty, uh, we tried in our research to question how are people enduring this situation?
00:49:50.400 --> 00:49:58.559
And specifically through through property, how are we using this property in order to endure this situation or this kind of uncertainty?
00:49:58.800 --> 00:50:27.440
Property became some kind of a flexible resource, but in very uneven ways, like depending on the type of property, the number of properties uh a person owns, uh, how they use it, the land use, or so from from the cases that we've interviewed so far, um we've seen examples of selling lands or assets in order to rebuild a livelihood or a business elsewhere in a safer area, like in Nobatia, for example, a city.
00:50:27.760 --> 00:50:37.360
Um others hold on to their property, waiting for for the for conditions to stabilize because they can't risk uh their properties.
00:50:37.840 --> 00:50:47.119
Uh those with multiple properties actually were able to relocate more easily and moving from from a home to a safe, from their homes to a safer place.
00:50:47.519 --> 00:50:57.599
Uh and um some people actually stayed in one place while periodically returning to a different property in order to repair or check on the damaged property.
00:50:58.000 --> 00:51:01.920
Uh there was also this parallel dynamic of renting.
00:51:02.000 --> 00:51:12.719
Uh some some property owners rented out their units, uh, often to people who lost homes or uh those coming from abroad during summer times.
00:51:12.960 --> 00:51:16.079
So they turned their property into a source of income.
00:51:16.719 --> 00:51:28.800
Uh we've seen also investment patterns like uh that were shaped by this condition, uh, where uh some repair immediately, even if uh if they they have the means.
00:51:29.119 --> 00:51:36.400
Others repaired partially and waited, and some even abandoned their properties and waiting for the conditions to stabilize.
00:51:36.480 --> 00:51:38.320
So they didn't invest in repairs.
00:51:38.719 --> 00:51:58.320
There was also one thing I think it's worth mentioning, and it's not something that we have uh seen or materialized yet, but there are growing concerns about mass uh mass land transactions that could happen, uh, particularly in the in the border villages where they are now uh kind of uh abandoned.
00:51:58.639 --> 00:52:12.880
So uh because this is an area that is um kindly kind of now, um there are colonial visions for this area, like uh Trump's plan of turning this border area into an economic industrial zone.
00:52:13.119 --> 00:52:17.440
So there are fears, and activists are actually raising awareness on that.
00:52:17.599 --> 00:52:26.480
And no, this could be used uh uh took advantage of in order to uh uh to mass cell for distressed cell.
00:52:26.960 --> 00:52:41.920
So uh uh there there are there are uh like uh uh awareness on that, and uh they are uh suggesting temporarily freezing landscapes in that for as example for for as a protective measure.
00:52:42.239 --> 00:52:42.480
Okay.
00:52:42.639 --> 00:52:43.280
So yeah.
00:52:43.599 --> 00:52:44.480
I just thank you.
00:52:44.559 --> 00:52:59.119
It's really good to get a sense of the richness of all the different things you've been learning on the ground, and this has also been combined, of course, with a new suite of digital methods that Hannah you've been trying to use or using uh in different ways, uh being unable to travel there yourself.
00:52:59.199 --> 00:53:07.920
So I wondered if you could say a little bit about how you're combining this kind of new for you, this new world of digital ethnography with the kinds of things that Marion's been doing.
00:53:08.079 --> 00:53:12.480
How have you adopted these new methods in response to the challenges you've faced in the project?
00:53:12.960 --> 00:53:13.519
Yeah, thank you.
00:53:13.679 --> 00:53:17.199
I mean it's been unexpected, and I've certainly had to learn as I've been going.
00:53:17.440 --> 00:53:23.679
Um, but it's been a really interesting kind of deviation, I guess, from my original plan.
00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:35.039
Um I mean, I think I was trying to I was trying to think a bit more broadly about where these kind of debates and discussions about property would be happening.
00:53:35.280 --> 00:53:45.440
Um, and obviously a lot of people who do this type of digital work on property, um, housing and so on look at real estate listings, this kind of thing.
00:53:45.519 --> 00:53:53.039
But it's quite difficult to get access to very reliable data at scale um about housing, real estate transactions in Lebanon.
00:53:53.280 --> 00:54:01.599
Um so I was trying to think, okay, well, where else are these conversations happening uh about land, about housing?
00:54:02.320 --> 00:54:11.440
And um I turned to Reddit, but there's also you know these really uh vibrant WhatsApp panels as well, where you can get a lot of information.
00:54:11.599 --> 00:54:14.000
And I kind of turn to these spaces as public fora.
00:54:14.159 --> 00:54:23.679
So I'm thinking of these places as I guess like places of discussion, of advice giving, advice asking, um, and opinion giving as well.
00:54:23.920 --> 00:54:28.159
Um, so the research that I've been doing online has largely focused on the question of housing.
00:54:28.239 --> 00:54:32.960
It seems to be the primary concern of people who are going to these online spaces.
00:54:33.199 --> 00:54:37.280
Um, but there are really great researchers who are doing fascinating work on land.
00:54:37.360 --> 00:54:45.599
So Ahmed Baidun has been doing some fascinating work on land and white phosphorus um pollution destruction in South Lebanon.
00:54:46.000 --> 00:55:00.320
Um so I guess that's these discussion forums provide a kind of wealth of information and maybe an overwhelming amount of data actually about the ways that people are thinking about housing, um, their own and other people's.
00:55:00.480 --> 00:55:02.559
And they're kind of debating a few things.
00:55:02.719 --> 00:55:11.039
They're debating what housing is currently used for, uh, whether it's to rent out to other people, whether it's to kind of um store your wealth.
00:55:11.440 --> 00:55:22.079
You know, I think it should be clear from what Miriam's been saying that this is really, for some people, their only asset in a context where there's been a massive financial crisis and people have lost their savings.
00:55:22.559 --> 00:55:27.519
So, you know, what what is what is housing used for and what ought it to be used for?
00:55:27.599 --> 00:55:30.719
These are really like moral, ethical conversations that are happening.
00:55:31.039 --> 00:55:44.000
But people are also kind of having conversations about what housing ought to be valued at and how people value housing, um, and how conflict has changed housing values or what housing ought to be used for.
00:55:44.239 --> 00:55:52.000
Um, I think what has been important for me is to recognize what this data cannot tell us, which is what people are actually doing.
00:55:52.239 --> 00:55:55.360
It's telling us what people think, but it's not telling us what actually is happening.
00:55:55.519 --> 00:55:59.039
So this is really a place for debate and discussion.
00:55:59.199 --> 00:56:06.400
Um, but for that reason alone, you know, thinking about property as a moral relationship as much as it is a thing.
00:56:06.639 --> 00:56:11.840
Um, that has been a fascinating place to look to, these online discussion forums.
00:56:12.639 --> 00:56:28.960
I mean, of course, you're having to potentially now adapt the research yet another time, but you've got these sort of opportunities, I guess, to triangulate the data of how people are thinking, the moral imaginations about planning and land injustice with the kind of on-the-ground analysis that Mariam's able to do.
00:56:29.119 --> 00:56:42.880
Um, and maybe just to wrap up, because unfortunately we will have to, um, Lebanon's obviously in a very alarming situation once again with these levels of devastation that are very hard to keep track of given the scale and pace of this war.
00:56:43.039 --> 00:56:52.880
And presumably in both your online and offline spaces, you've been tracking what people are talking about, how they're feeling, what's being discussed.
00:56:53.039 --> 00:57:07.119
Um I just wanted to give you both the opportunity to wrap up by sharing any speculative thoughts about how this might concretely affect the housing and property situations for the groups that you're working with and the families and that you're working with?
00:57:07.679 --> 00:57:13.840
Concerning the situation now in Lebanon, I think it all depends on how this war ends and how it unfolds.
00:57:13.920 --> 00:57:18.719
Um I think if there are many questions that that uh we need to know.
00:57:18.880 --> 00:57:24.559
You know, will there be any form of occupation of the land uh after this war in the south?
00:57:24.719 --> 00:57:30.719
Will the border areas really be uh the buffer zone really be expanded as the Israelis are talking about?
00:57:30.960 --> 00:57:41.760
If this succeeds, then uh more people will have uh no access to their properties, which means more suspended uh property condition to many people.
00:57:42.079 --> 00:57:58.400
And uh if there will be reconstruction this time, if it would it be allowed this time, whether it happens and in what scale and in what conditions, and will there be external aid like in 2006 or uh or uh uh once again there this will be halted.
00:57:58.480 --> 00:58:04.000
And uh so this is all contingent on how this regional war actually ends.
00:58:04.239 --> 00:58:20.079
If the reconstruction is delayed once again and not funded and politically conditioned, then we would uh anticipate something happening just like how the 15 months ago, uh, people relying on their own sources on uh uh on uh self-funded recovery.
00:58:20.239 --> 00:58:28.400
And uh, but this will also create more unequal inequality on those who have uh uh assets versus those who don't.
00:58:28.559 --> 00:58:43.280
And given that uh in 15 months, people have drained lots of their resources in displacement in their self-funded repairs and in this uh prolonged uh uh uncertainty and holding halting of their lives and their businesses.
00:58:43.519 --> 00:58:58.559
So I think if if uh return is once again um delayed, there will be also more displacement pressure on on uh on other uh areas like like Nabati, like Sur, like Beirut uh uh as well.
00:58:58.800 --> 00:59:03.199
So this is all depending on how this war will actually end.
00:59:03.599 --> 00:59:09.519
Mari mentioned the special economic zone that was proposed by the American negotiating team last August.
00:59:09.679 --> 00:59:16.159
Um, this kind of this zone between Israel and the rest of Lebanon, but it would be in Lebanon.
00:59:16.480 --> 00:59:26.960
And this is really kind of an extension of the Israeli buffer zone, um, but it's also an extension of their power and control over Lebanon as well.
00:59:27.199 --> 00:59:43.920
And you know, we have to think about that in relation to what's happening in Gaza and the kinds of proposals that are being um discussed there about the future of this place and thinking about who has control, who has power over these places and what they're used for.
00:59:44.159 --> 00:59:53.840
Um these are the kind of bigger questions that I'm thinking about at the moment, but of course, you know, are quite difficult to discuss at the moment because people are focusing on survival.
00:59:54.159 --> 01:00:08.079
So I think this will be something that will come up maybe sooner rather than later, as what tends to be the case, you know, we we think that we've got better time and uh you know Trump has other ideas, Netanyahu has other ideas.
01:00:08.480 --> 01:00:10.239
Well, listen, I think we're gonna have to end here.
01:00:10.320 --> 01:00:12.320
Uh but thank you so much for joining us.
01:00:12.480 --> 01:00:21.920
Um, I'm sure many listeners will be keen to hear what comes out of this project because it's a really unique perspective on uh uniquely tumultuous period in the in the history of of Lebanon.
01:00:22.079 --> 01:00:28.000
And please uh also our listeners obviously should check out the the wider work of the Beirut Urban Lab and everything you've been doing.
01:00:28.159 --> 01:00:32.239
So we'll make sure we put plenty of relevant links in in this the show notes.
01:00:32.639 --> 01:00:33.679
Thank you very much, both of you.
01:00:34.000 --> 01:00:34.239
Thank you.
01:00:34.559 --> 01:00:35.599
Thank you for having us.
01:00:35.840 --> 01:00:37.519
Yeah, thank you for having us.
01:00:46.639 --> 01:00:50.159
Well, it was so interesting to have them on at this time.
01:00:50.400 --> 01:00:56.800
Um as as we said, and you know, like we wanted Hannah to come on for a long time because of what's been happening within the region and her work there.
01:00:56.880 --> 01:01:01.679
But of course, she's had such challenges doing the research that it's um it's been difficult.
01:01:01.760 --> 01:01:08.639
But now working with Mariam on the ground, they've been able to do something that I think will be really interesting, and it's such a moving picture.
01:01:08.719 --> 01:01:21.679
But this issue that's often overlooked of how do you actually deal with mass, continuous, ongoing displacement of populations when you have no housing system and people have to gravitate towards urban areas because they they they have no land that they can farm.
01:01:22.000 --> 01:01:25.599
They've been displaced, they have to find some way of living, and you have no housing system.
01:01:25.760 --> 01:01:34.159
And so it really does depend on, in some ways, the the dexterity and ingenuity of people who own property to turn that into an asset for them to use.
01:01:34.320 --> 01:01:36.239
So there's a kind of capitalist logic there.
01:01:36.400 --> 01:01:43.920
These are often middle-class family, uh property families, but they are managing the refugee problem and the displacement problem.
01:01:44.159 --> 01:01:46.000
And that's something that they're going to be uncovering through this week.
01:01:46.079 --> 01:02:04.559
Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It's that contradiction, isn't it, both in terms of, as you say, the kind of rentier capitalism that potentially could be one way of analysing this, but there's also these practices of survival and kinship and care that are happening where people are thinking about the wider responsibilities and how they house and how they respond to such traumatic violent situations.
01:02:05.119 --> 01:02:24.079
And I think it's also really interesting the way Hannah's I mean, this idea that she had, and I remember when she came up with it of looking at Reddit and all these discussions around buying and selling housing on Reddit that have moved online or that have been online but have taken on a new significance among diaspora, um among Lebanese people who are there, and being able to analyse that, it's it's really interesting.
01:02:24.159 --> 01:02:26.159
It's something I never would have thought of of doing.
01:02:26.320 --> 01:02:35.280
But I think, you know, having been forced into that digital ethnographic space will produce some really interesting ethnographic insights when you put it into conversation with what's happening on the ground.
01:02:35.360 --> 01:02:45.920
And I think in the the levels of displacement we're seeing across obviously the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, um, the scales of conflicts we've been seeing in the past few years, the scale of displacement, it's unbelievable.
01:02:46.000 --> 01:02:47.039
It's extraordinary.
01:02:47.199 --> 01:03:07.440
And the pressure that that's putting on people's land and housing, the implications it's gonna have for the availability of farmland, for people turning their plots into all sorts of kind of little rental units, these are gonna play out over the years to come with implications for all kinds of things, from food to overcrowding and health, um, yeah, in ways that we can't yet foresee.
01:03:07.920 --> 01:03:08.400
No, you're right.
01:03:08.480 --> 01:03:19.440
I mean, there's this kind of accidental innovation that has happened through a situation which no one would have wanted to around the combination of the digital ethnography, whilst Mariam, of course, is continuing to do work on the ground.
01:03:19.920 --> 01:03:28.559
The other thing I was just going to say about the importance of what they're doing is that focus on small towns and small cities and how that complements the Beirut Urban Labs work.
01:03:28.639 --> 01:03:36.239
I mean they don't just work in Beirut, but we do tend to get this focus on the major cities uh with their very distinct and interesting dynamics.
01:03:36.320 --> 01:03:42.800
But most of the world's urbanisation is happening in secondary cities and small towns, and they are the places that are going to absorb displaced people.
01:03:42.880 --> 01:03:45.760
So this is a real it's actually quite frontier research, I think, in some ways.
01:03:46.239 --> 01:03:51.840
No, I was just reflecting about the kind of emotional content of what it means to do research like this.
01:03:51.920 --> 01:03:57.840
Um, and Hannah mentioned, of course, that we did have Mona Fowaz on the podcast last year.
01:03:58.079 --> 01:04:07.519
Um and I think, you know, again, Mariam's really brought to life how important the work of the lab is in mapping and visualising and collecting data in contexts where it doesn't always exist.
01:04:07.760 --> 01:04:17.440
But Mona also spoke about that kind of emotional impact and the toll of doing the research as kind of actually a tool for maintaining your sanity.
01:04:17.519 --> 01:04:37.440
So there's another argument of why we actually have to keep going with doing some of this because we are creating the kind of archives, the evidence of what's actually happening in different places when villages and neighbourhoods are being erased and displaced people are arriving in Beirut from these smaller towns that Hannah was previously doing her work in.
01:04:37.599 --> 01:04:45.199
And I was always really struck by what Mona said then about how you do relief work and continue to be a researcher at the same time.
01:04:45.360 --> 01:05:00.960
And I heard that uh Mona was in London for the city lecture um just two days after the war started, and the current war, um, and was emphasising, you know, how hard it is to think about keeping going, but also how essential it is that we do continue to do this kind of work.
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Yeah, so for those who haven't listened, do check out that episode from last summer where we spoke with Mona Fewaz and Nashine Anwar about running an urban lab and um the role of urban labs in context of crisis, uh disinformation, and conflict.
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But I think we need to leave it there.
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We do thank you all for listening.
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Yeah, please do tune in again next time.
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Um, we already have our feature recorded, um, which is going to be a treat, a double book talk on chaos and desire.
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Don't miss it.
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Goodbye.
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Thank you.
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Bye.